George Stephanopoulos Award
The George Stephanopoulos Award is presented in recognition of outstanding achievements in Process Systems Engineering. The Award is co-sponsored by the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, the EFCE Working Party on Computer Aided Process Engineering, and the AIChE-CAST Division.
Laureate
The first George Stephanopoulos Award in Process Systems Engineering (PSE) was presented to Professor Claire Adjiman, Imperial College London, UK, on 3 June 2024 at the ESCAPE-34 / PSE-24 conference in Florence, Italy.
Prof. George Stephanopoulos (born in Kalamata, Greece, in 1947) is a leading scholar, pioneer, and visionary in the field of Process Systems Engineering (PSE) and one of the most celebrated graduates of NTUA. His work includes seminal contributions influential to the community that provided the broadest coverage of PSE approaches and methodologies in process synthesis and design (continuous and batch); computer-aided modelling languages; process control; fault detection and diagnosis; operations planning; product design; synthesis of reaction and metabolic networks; synthesis and design of petrochemical sectors (Greece, Argentina); synthesis and design of biorefineries; synthesis and design of pharmaceutical processes; AI in process engineering (products, processes, control, operations), and most recently in systems applications for the circular economy.
Prof. Stephanopoulos has received all major distinctions for a person in PSE. He worked both in top rated universities (University of Minnesota, MIT, including shorter terms at NTUA and Arizona State University) and senior industrial positions (CTO and Board Member of Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation). His extensive academic family should be considered the most important part of his legacy. Through his students and their students, his academic family tree includes 850 members (as of 2017) installed at chemical engineering schools worldwide, primarily in Europe and USA. Specifically, for Greece and NTUA, the Greek PSE contingency in Europe, North America, Middle East, and elsewhere, is among the largest and most prominent. The George Stephanopoulos Award is set up to recognize their contributions and accomplishments.